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Logan Freeman is co-Founder and Principal of FTW Investments and serves as the Chief Development Officer. Logan has facilitated over $150M in real estate transactions.
Mr. Freeman is an advocate for affordable housing and works closely with many organizations in helping to end homelessness in Kansas City. Understanding how to “do well by doing good” is Logan’s motto and has made it his “why” for doing business.
Logan’s entrepreneurial journey is an inspiring one! He demonstrates the true spirit of entrepreneurship that has been driven through hard work and self-education. He shares his outstanding transformation and how he overcame the challenging conventional mindset that led him to new opportunities.
He has a unique understanding of the needs and wants of sophisticated investors enabling him to effectively support individuals and organizations along their investment journey. He covers the many details of the current market and what assets he focuses on.
Logan’s story will guide you on your journey towards success as it has done for him – just listen closely because he shares some valuable insights about reaching higher levels in business or investing with confidence that only someone who has been there can truly understand.
In This Episode
- Where it all began for Logan and how he got into real estate.
- Logan’s amazing transformation and mindset.
- Personal wealth strategy that Logan believes in.
- What is new in the market, what assets the FTW focuses on and what is the buy back.
- Mr. Freeman’s way of accelerating your wealth trajectory.
Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Wealth Strategy Secrets. Today we’re joined by Logan Freeman. Logan is co-founder and principal of FTW Investments and serves as the Chief Development Officer. Logan has facilitated over $150 million in real estate transactions and has a unique understanding of the needs and wants of sophisticated investors, enabling him to effectively support individuals and organizations along their investment journey.
Logan is particularly adept at sourcing off-market properties, with more than 50 percent of his completed transactions involving off-market properties. Having completed over 125 transactions, Logan has found a reliable process for executing real estate transactions. Logan is an advocate for affordable housing and works closely with many organizations in helping to end homelessness in Kansas City. Understanding how to do well by doing good is Logan’s motto and has made it his “why” for doing business. Logan holds an MBA from the University of Central Missouri, and we’re proud to have him on the show. Logan, welcome aboard.
Dave, thanks for having me. I’m energized, thriving, and focused, and I think we’re going to bring a lot of value today.
Awesome. Really looking forward to it. So why don’t we kick off? For folks who aren’t familiar, tell us a little bit about your background. I know you had a bit of a career in football as well. Where did it all begin for you, and how did you end up in real estate?
Dave, do you know what the capital of Missouri is by chance?
I do not. Not a lot of people do, so not…
A lot of people do, and that’s where I grew up. Jefferson City, Missouri. When people think about Missouri, they often think of St. Louis, Kansas City, and maybe Columbia, where the university is. Jeff City is right in the middle of the state. I always liken Jefferson City to Carol Dweck’s book about the two different mindsets. You’ve got a fixed mindset—this is how it’s always been and this is how it’s going to be. Then you have a growth mindset—my decisions and impact on the world can be dictated by the things I do. If I delay gratification now, I might have a better future. I think Jeff City is a bit on the fixed mindset side. It’s a great place to grow up, but my eyes weren’t really opened until I started visiting cities like Kansas City and meeting people from larger cities when I started to play football.
My whole life, I identified as an athlete. I grew up playing football, basketball, and baseball. I got the opportunity to play Division II football with a scholarship and had a great career there. I was picked up as an undrafted free agent with the Oakland Raiders but was ultimately cut. I had the opportunity to continue, but I made a decision that I wasn’t going to be an athlete anymore. It was an internal desire to break out of the mold I had created for myself, which was just as an athlete. When I was cut from the NFL, I felt a huge burden lift off my shoulders. It gave me the opportunity to recreate and re-identify myself.
The 49ers called and wanted me to come out to camp, but I said no. I went back to school and finished my master’s degree. This is where my eyes were really opened. I went through a massive physical transformation, losing 120 pounds in six months. At the NFL combine, I was 335 pounds. I had to get a job too because I didn’t have a scholarship or any money. As an undrafted free agent, you don’t make any money unless you get a contract. I was going to school full-time and working full-time, so I had to have a very disciplined and rigorous schedule.
I’ll walk you through that. I would wake up at 3:30 in the morning, head to the gym, go home, eat breakfast, and then drive an hour to work. This is where my transformation happened because I turned my car into a classroom on wheels. I started to listen to guys like Zig Ziglar, Jim Rohn, Tony Robbins, and Brian Tracy. This was before podcasts were really a big thing. I had CDs that I was listening to. I made 265 cold calls a day, got told no 264 times a day, but I learned the resilience you need in business. Then I would go to school for four hours in the evening. On Saturdays, I spent 12 hours in the library catching up. I was going to a formal education, but really my education was happening in my Nissan Maxima as I was driving to and from that job.
I started to hear different themes like passive income, different income streams, not just building income but building wealth. I didn’t know what that meant. I started to dive into what money is, how it’s created, the velocity of it, and how you get paid in the marketplace. That took me down a few rabbit holes, one of which was real estate. I read “Rich Dad Poor Dad” and learned the cash flow quadrant of being an employee, self-employed, a business owner, and an investor. I had all this theoretical knowledge I was taking in, but thankfully I had mentors who were living this out in real life. I was able to see it effective at the applied level, pairing these two things together. I’m so grateful for these men in my life who really helped me.
After I graduated, my father had battled with drugs and alcohol his whole life. When he was moving me out of my apartment, he couldn’t walk up the stairs. My dad was 6’3″, 250 pounds, a strapping Native American guy who could dunk a basketball and hit a golf ball 300 yards. He couldn’t walk up the stairs. Less than three weeks later, he passed away from complications of liver cirrhosis and having a stroke. In six months of my life, I was no longer a football player, lost 120 pounds, went through a mental transformation, and lost my dad—all in six or seven months. It was a big period of time.
My mentors said, “Logan, this may be the most important decision point in your life. You need to really think through this.” They helped me through the process and asked what the four most important things in my life were. They gave me the first three: faith, family, and fitness. The last one could be fun, future, food—whatever you want it to be. You can see themes here with the F’s: Freeman and all the different F’s in my life. I chose future. I wanted to break out of lower middle class and understand how to build wealth.
I moved to Kansas City after burying my dad and became a franchise consultant with Jimmy John’s. I was a corporate employee, the youngest franchise consultant they had ever hired. I had 25 stores between Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas, and Iowa. In 12 months, I rose through the ranks and asked my boss what was next. He said, “Dude, you gotta put your time in.” Two weeks later, I was out. I joined a startup company with three individuals in an industry I had no knowledge of, but I knew the people at that company would bring me up. I was there for about three years.
I met my wife and the best man in my wedding there. I really learned how to sell and build relationships. I left that job and took what I thought was a safe, comfortable W-2 job. Fifteen months into that job, I was fired. I learned that I was unemployable. My beautiful wife said, “Logan, this is your time. I’m going to support you. You go do what you want to do.”
Just by happenstance, I had a mentor in my life—a guy who had sold me some single-family homes here in Kansas City. He said, “Hey man, my head of acquisitions just left. I just landed a $50 million fund as a client, and I need somebody to come in and find product for them.” I said, “Well, I just got fired, so this is a perfect time.”
I joined up with this fund, and we were buying single-family homes in 2017 and 2018 for cash. In seven days, we would buy them, renovate them, rent them out, and then I did a big refinance over 265 homes. We were the sixth group in the country to go through the CoreVest portfolio refinance. We put a big non-recourse debt option on this portfolio, returned the capital to the investors, and it still cash flowed. I had to know how that worked, so I sat down with those fund sponsors. They gave me some tips and said, “Logan, this was a syndication.” I had the bug—I knew that was exactly what I wanted to do.
What didn’t I have? Knowledge, experience, and a track record. So, I moved my license to a commercial and multifamily brokerage because I didn’t want to do it on single-family homes—I wanted to do it on multifamily and commercial. I started brokering those types of properties to 1031 exchange buyers, all on the buy side. I learned the acquisition process for that asset class. That helped me understand the whole transaction process and how to find these off-market deals.
Then I started to buy some properties myself, but I quickly ran out of capital and experience. In 2019, I decided it was time to find some business partners. I took stock of my strengths and weaknesses and overlaid that with the transaction process in the commercial real estate world. I found business partners that could supplement my skills, and that was extremely important.
In 2019, we started buying our first multifamily properties. We were very bullish on neighborhood retail shopping centers at the time, but we all know what happened in March of 2020—COVID-19, global pandemic, lockdowns, which affected all retail shopping centers. We pivoted into multifamily and made some big moves. We hit doubles and triples when everyone else was on the sidelines. This allowed us to build a portfolio of about a thousand multifamily units in about eight months. It was a crazy time. We had three guys and an admin. It was wild, trying to get debt for these projects, but we made it happen.
In the last 15 to 16 months, we’ve been building the operational team to continue to scale. We’ve added another 300 or 400 multifamily units, some office assets, some retail assets, and we’re now in the mobile home community space as well. We’re continuing to grow. Now, our team is 24 people here in Kansas City. We’re positioning ourselves as an asset manager and a private equity company that sees opportunities not just in multifamily but different asset classes. When we see that pricing arbitrage, we can execute quickly. That’s what we’ve been up to, and that’s my transition into the space, Dave.
Awesome. Thanks for sharing that with the audience, Logan. It sounds like you made quite a transformation—a huge light bulb moment, right? And there’s a few key themes that I’d like to go back to in your background that are really interesting. We talk a lot about mindset, and sometimes people overplay it, but I can’t stress enough the importance of mindset. You had the courage to start challenging conventional wisdom, thinking outside the box. It sounds like once you started getting some mentors and resources through reading and podcasts, you realized there’s a different way to think than the 90% around us who are doing things a certain way. You committed hard to changing that. That’s massive. I was in the Marine Corps, and it sounds like your training was on par with that for sure.
Absolutely, yeah.
I love that commitment you made to overcome that challenge. With that, it creates more confidence and greater capability, which you then transitioned into your current business, which is really outstanding. It all starts with that mindset and challenging conventional wisdom. I’m sure you can resonate with this—it’s always frustrating when we have great opportunities to present to investors, but certain people, even family and friends, don’t take the time to understand it because of previous beliefs they have, whether from how they were raised or mainstream media and the people they’re surrounded by. If you can just start by opening up your mind a little bit, it’s amazing how many new opportunities can present themselves.
You know, I read a couple of books that I’d like to point people to. One that really helped me understand how value and wealth are created was MJ DeMarco’s book “Millionaire Fastlane.” It’s a catchy, kind of crazy title, but this guy takes on the mainstream media and the dogma pedaled through all the different channels and breaks it down. It was the most illuminating book I have ever read. It’s a big, thick book. I listened to it and read it, and it was a game changer for me.
My mom spent a lot of time with me growing up. I struggled with ADD and obsessive-compulsive disorder. She took me to a psychologist or psychiatrist, and it was cutting-edge technology. They put electrodes on my head and said, “I’m going to throw stimuli at you, and it’s your job to navigate that and keep your internal levels at a certain level through your own mind.” I was like, “What are we doing here?” I was 12 or 13 years old at the time, and that really influenced my belief that the mind is the most powerful tool we have if it’s trained the right way.
Going through the whole process of being cut from the NFL and losing my father, I got to use some of those tools. I dove back into a great book called “Emotional Intelligence 2.0” by Daniel Goleman. Your IQ is pretty fixed, but your emotional quotient (EQ) is something you can improve upon. That book breaks it down. You take a quiz, go through the trainings, and then take the quiz again to see how you’re doing. I focused on that, and it allowed me to look at myself objectively, make decisions, and stay out of the emotions of it. It was an incredible tool for me.
I also read a lot of Tony Robbins and Darren Hardy. They helped set the stage to say, “This is not going to be easy. You’re going to be going against the grain.” The road less traveled, as Robert Frost wrote. That set the stage for me to know it would be difficult, and there would be pushback. But if I could get people in my life thinking the same way, I would be able to pull myself back up. I had to break out of old social circles and get around people doing the things I was reading about. That really helped me on the mindset side of the business and personally.
Yeah, no, absolutely. That’s really solid. People don’t realize how powerful books are. That’s where you get innovative ideas and challenge traditional thinking. We all read books in college, but they were a little bit boring. When you pick up some of these books, like “Millionaire Fastlane,” it’s almost a download of someone’s life. You can read it in a week and get so much knowledge from that. Super powerful. Logan, with this mindset transformation and everything you took into getting into real estate, can you tell us a little bit about your personal wealth strategy?
Absolutely, I’d love to. You know, I got my first job when I was 14 years old. Not a lot of people hire 14-year-olds—I had to have my mom sign off, my school sign off. I started at a catering business washing dishes, and on the weekends, I would throw hay in hay fields. Believe it or not, I would just walk around and put hay out of a field on a trailer, then unload it at people’s houses and barns.
I really started to make some money early on. I was in a personal finance class at the time. Dave Ramsey was my high school personal finance coach through that class, so I thought I needed to start a Roth IRA. I did, and I’m not knocking any of those things—I think saving is fine. But I started to try to understand, “If I’m going to do this for 65 years, putting away a certain amount of money, when I’m 65, I’m going to be old.” There were guys living lives I wanted to live, and they were 30, 35, 20, 25. I wondered, “How do they do it?”
For me, it came down to one of two routes. One, you can have a new, novel, creative idea. That’s not me. I don’t have that type of skill set and knowledge base. So for me, it was, “What did everybody else do?” I ran across a quote—I don’t know who said it, maybe Rockefeller or Carnegie—that said, “99% of the world’s millionaires were built through real estate.” I don’t know if that’s true, but I didn’t care. I thought, “Well, that’s fantastic. How?”
I started to realize real estate can provide income, depreciation, equity buildup, appreciation, and you can use leverage. That paired well with MJ DeMarco’s book “The Millionaire Fastlane,” which outlines the five commandments of business: control, high barrier of entry, need, stepping away from time, and scalability. I thought, “I can build a business in the real estate space while building wealth simultaneously.” I don’t know many other businesses that allow you to do that.
I needed to understand personal finance—getting out of debt. Even with all the scholarships I had, I still had collegiate debt. I got rid of my debt, then put a budget together to understand my income and expenses. My income wasn’t going to increase at the rate I wanted, so I needed to find something else. For me, that was being a business owner and self-employed individual at first.
I understood that, but scaling and stepping away with your time is crucial. Business ownership and investing started to come into play. There have been studies showing solo business owners are typically capped between $500,000 and $600,000 in income. It’s hard to scale past that without putting people around you. I thought, “What are my strengths?” Communication, relationship building. I needed to attract talent and people who did things better than I did in certain aspects. Together, we could build something scalable.
Now, I look at real estate as an investment and other asset types. I consider my circle of competency, what I have access to, and what I can execute on. After meeting with guys who are 30-40 years ahead of me with family offices doing crazy tech stuff, I realized they all have a fundamental foundation of cash flow, a lot rooted in real estate.
My personal wealth strategy now focuses on cash flow, creating a steady business foundation. The cash flow allows us to take more risks with our capital in other ventures, probably starting with ancillary businesses that fuel the real estate business and then expanding. Meeting family offices confirmed this for me—they started with apartments, office buildings, and industrial properties. I’m focusing on getting good at the fundamentals and the foundation. I’m a young guy with a long time ahead of me, so I want to be patient. It’s tough for a hard-charging, type-A person, but making calculated, mitigated risks and protecting the downside is crucial.
My personal wealth strategy is getting good at one thing, creating cash flow, and using that to get riskier in other ventures.
Yeah, that’s really well said. I think it’s interesting too because almost all of us in this space have read Kiyosaki, and it was really one of the most transformational moments for us to understand how money works, right? The Cash Flow Quadrant was illuminating from a tax standpoint. But one thing I found was that, at the time, these were very conceptual books. They seemed kind of theoretical, like, okay, real estate is the asset class versus stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. Let me explore that.
In terms of building wealth the way the wealthy do, I made many mistakes over the years. I followed financial planner advice, put my money and my kids’ money in 529 plans, and put money in 401ks. But the lessons you’re talking about—it’s awesome that you learned them so quickly. That’s one of the reasons we share the same philosophy. What’s so empowering is to take these lessons that took us years to learn and help other people experience that sooner. The only regret, if I have any, is that I wish I knew these things earlier because you could be further along the path.
There’s this concept that really ties to this whole space. It’s not just about defining wealth; it’s about freedom. Freedom of money, purpose, relationship, and time. It’s cool that you understood your strengths and unique abilities, doubled down on them, partnered with others, and stayed in that space. There are people with a lot of money or high income who aren’t happy or fulfilled. Following the principles you’re talking about is about fulfillment and having a mission. It sounds like you’re on an awesome trajectory for that.
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I would say, Dave, that the biggest thing for me was knowledge is not power. Knowledge is potential power. Knowledge plus action is power. Early on in my career, I took a shotgun approach, thinking, “I don’t know what I don’t know, and I don’t know anything. Let me just take massive action.” That worked well as a solopreneur. But when you start to get more strategic and have people relying on you, you have to take massive strategic action.
So, I got really in-depth in business books like EOS with Traction and other business books that helped me understand how to scale a business. How do you think about growing from $1 million in revenue to $3 million, to $5 million, to $25 million, to $100 million? I started understanding that just taking a ton of action wasn’t the right route. I needed to be more strategic.
One of my wife’s top talents is being strategic, and that’s why she’s very good at what she does. She looked at my life and said, “You just need to focus. You’re not afraid, and you don’t care what people think. But you need to take all of that energy and focus it into one clear, concise, and compelling area.” That was really important for me.
Early on, taking massive action is phenomenal. It’s kind of the Grant Cardone approach, which is great—that’s just one component. But then you need to get strategic, understand what your competitive advantage is, and what you can actually execute on. Shiny object syndrome kills most businesses, in my opinion. They have this core thing they do well, but then they see other people iterating on it and think, “Oh my gosh, I need to do that too.” They get out of their core competency and fail. Their core business starts to struggle because they’ve taken their energy away from it.
Being clear, disciplined, and intentional about your goals and what you’re trying to accomplish is crucial. Staying away from shiny object syndrome is especially important in today’s environment where new asset classes and investment opportunities are being created out of thin air.
I think you said it best—these ideas are complete at the theoretical level, but they’re very hard to apply effectively. Thankfully, I saw men and women living this out regularly—not just in their businesses, but in their faith, families, and fitness. In the last 24 months, I’ve been hyper-focused on my own fitness. I’m down 34 pounds, I sleep better, and I have more energy. That’s so important as a business owner and person to keep your mental health strong.
If you’re going to be a business owner or investor, you have to have these skills strong because it’s not easy. At the conference we were at, the best thing I heard was, “This business is a knife fight every single day.” I’ve used that ever since and experienced it. If you’re willing to step into that and embrace it, the results can be incredible. But not many people are willing to, and that’s okay.
I had a conversation with a high performer yesterday, an engineer, who felt capped out and was thinking about building a business. I asked him what’s important to him. He said, “I want to be able to pick my kids up and have life freedom.” I told him, “You don’t need to be a business owner. Just enjoy what you are doing and invest your money.” That was a light bulb moment for him.
I chose this path because I want to be challenged and build something incredible that I can pass on, creating a legacy for the Freeman family name in Kansas City. But if I choose that route and don’t embrace the struggle, then what am I doing? I have to know it’s going to be hard. If it was easy, everybody would be doing it, right, Dave?
Yeah, absolutely. That’s so well said. And I think also from that health standpoint, it’s just so important to appreciate the magnitude of health. You could have all the wealth in the world, but if you didn’t have your health, where would you be? The importance of goal setting with that—you know, like I literally have a goal to live to 116. By setting that goal, you might say it’s crazy, but what it does is, today, this week, I have longevity and vitality goals. I need to do a certain amount of workouts, eat certain ways, and I’m constantly thinking about that. Another key pillar—that is one of the key pillars in our overall wealth strategy.
So, Logan, let’s transition a little bit into FTW and what you’re doing today. Tell us a little bit more about what you’re seeing in the market. Kansas City is a unique market. Most of our community is investing in some of the typical areas—Southeast, Southwest, where we see high job and population growth. But tell us a little bit more about your market, what asset classes you’re focusing on, and what your buy box looks like.
Yeah, well, just from a macroeconomic standpoint first, if you track property price indexes, I think Green Street has one of the best ones out there. You can look at the last 24-26 months. April 2020, we really started to see a massive decline in commercial real estate prices. That continued until September. Then, in September and October, we started this hockey stick growth. Now, we’ve leveled out on the property price index, but we’ve leveled out at a much higher level than pre-pandemic levels. That’s interesting to track.
Another piece I track regularly is the funds flow rate, meaning the new mortgage debt originated as a percentage of GDP. This is another great metric to keep your eyes on to see where cap rates are going. Everyone says interest rates and cap rates are directly correlated—they’re not. There’s some correlation, but there have been plenty of times in the last 10-15 years where they’ve gone in opposite directions. A better marker, in my mind, is the percentage of new mortgage debt as a percentage of GDP. This is at an all-time high as well. I’ll get a new reading after the second quarter on that front because it takes a lot of analysis to track monthly.
From April to September, we bought the bulk of our multifamily properties—about a thousand doors at an average of $45,000 a unit here in Kansas City. I’ve only been able to add 200-300 new properties on the multifamily side. So the question becomes, what do we start to focus on? We go back to what we’ve done and our experience. Previously, we were bullish on neighborhood retail shopping centers. Now, I have 26 months of data to analyze how these shopping centers performed. The weak businesses were weeded out—they failed, couldn’t make rent. The property owners put more essential businesses in these centers. Think e-commerce-resistant, service-based businesses—hardware stores, restaurants, banks, financial institutions, physical therapy, chiropractors. These are hard to do online.
I think we’ll continue to purchase more neighborhood retail shopping centers this year. Another macroeconomic point: when Class C multifamily properties have a stabilized yield on cost similar to new development, it makes sense to consider new development options. This is instead of paying the same price for an asset that’s not as well-located or new. But you have labor and construction costs that are 20% higher than last year, so that’s another challenge. We’ve been more open to development opportunities. I’m still extremely bullish on affordable housing. That’s why we’re entering the mobile home and manufactured housing space. There’s a shrinking supply of that product, and it’s a great asset to be in.
That’s where our core competencies are right now. We’re making some contrarian bets in the Midwest on suburban office—picking these things up for $65-$75 per square foot. You can’t develop these for less than $225 per square foot. We’ve seen a flight to quality in office space. Businesses consolidating into one well-located, well-parked location with amenities close to their employees. We’re purchasing some of those assets as well. That’s our focus—resetting expectations. I think there will be another buying opportunity, like in April 2020, in the near future.
I’m not going to pull the crystal ball out and tell you when that’s going to be, but I want to be ready. I want to have capital ready, I want to have the operations ready, and I want to have the relationships ready to be able to execute on those deals quickly. If you think about April 2020, everybody was saying, “Okay, I’m going to wait for pricing, I’m going to wait for pricing.” Well, people were transacting in that downhill and when it was at the bottom. If you were waiting, you missed out. Then you bought on the upswing potentially. You have to have these markers that you’re watching, have relationships, and be ready. You have to be able to think contrarian. When everybody’s looking left, you’ve got to be willing to go right. That’s kind of our thesis right now regarding the asset types we’re focused on.
Why do we love the Midwest? Well, we’re here. I think that’s the main component. I have relationships here. I know the markets extremely well. We’re in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa. I’d love to get into Oklahoma and Arkansas as well. Just really understanding those markets and feeling competent and confident that we can operate in them. We’ve had 17% year-over-year rent increases on multifamily in Kansas City. Just to put it in perspective, that’s 7.2%.
We’re always going to be behind the gateway markets or maybe the Sunbelt or the Southeast. We’re not going to see major appreciation on rents like other markets. It’s always about cash flow in these markets. Yes, you can force appreciation, but we’re not going to see natural appreciation that other markets do because we don’t have the population growth or job growth. But that’s okay if you price the deals right on the front end because you’re buying for cash flow and forced appreciation through cosmetic upgrades and operational efficiency.
From our standpoint, it’s back to that circle of competency. It’s where we’re located; it’s what we know. I love those other markets—Texas, Georgia, Florida, the Carolinas, Arizona—but I don’t have the same competitive advantage or strategic knowledge as I do here in the Midwest. Until we have partners that operate the same way we do here in the Midwest in those markets, I think we’re going to be hesitant to enter into them. Our investors also have holdings in those other markets, but they’re looking at the Midwest as more of a cash flow and safe play. That’s why we like the Midwest.
Kansas City has definitely started to get on people’s radars, causing larger checks to come in and lots of new development. People are chasing yield, which has caused competition but nothing like Arizona, Texas, or Florida. We still see opportunities here. There are cities and states behind Kansas City—Des Moines might be five years behind Kansas City, Omaha and Lincoln will never get to Kansas City’s size, but they have demand drivers like agriculture, finance, transportation, and farms. These make it easy for us to understand the demographics and psychographics in those markets and capitalize on growth trends in smaller markets that might catch up to Kansas City at some point.
Yeah, no, that’s a good point. You know, we’re always partnering with operators who just have a great niche in a particular market. When you’re playing this game, it’s all about diversifying. It’s actually focus and then diversification. So, you’re focusing on the asset class and your investment thesis, and then you get into how can we diversify better? You pointed out some really good points about why you would want to focus on a particular market, particular operator, when you can get that inside advantage, identifying off-market opportunities, cash flow, and it’s just a different profile.
Not all deals are created the same—they’re different, and having a good mix of those is important. Logan, what would you say if you could give just one piece of advice to our listeners about accelerating their own wealth trajectory?
Yeah, well, sometimes your greatest breakdowns can be breakthroughs in disguise. So, if you’re going through something right now, just realize that if you come out the other end, you can come out stronger, but it’s gonna take work. I read 750 books, Dave. I spent four hours every single day on myself, previous to being married and having two kids and all that stuff.
I still spend one hour a day on myself, but you gotta be selfish. There are a lot of times when I’m talking to a business owner, an investor, or a potential investor, and they have limiting beliefs. That’s okay. Everybody has limiting beliefs from their background, something somebody told them, or something they experienced. For me, it was really understanding that you can break through those, but it’s really important who you’re spending your time with.
Everyone says you’re the sum of the five people you spend the most time with, but it’s so true. If I’m bringing you an idea, Dave, and you’re in a different spectrum of thinking than I am, you might think, “Why would you ever do that?” To me, it might be the best idea in the world. You have to realize that your circle of influence is extremely important on the way you’re going to act.
The last piece of advice I’ll give is there’s typically one thing really holding somebody back. It could be health, finances, or one relationship. Take six, eight, ten, or twelve months and go fix that one thing. Many people think they have all these bad things happening or things holding them back. It’s usually one thing. Solve that, and the others start to open up.
For example, if you’re feeling tired all the time, maybe if you drop 30, 40, 50 pounds, start sleeping better, or drink less alcohol, that will impact your relationships and the way you deal with your finances. Find the biggest thing holding you back, solve that for six to twelve months, and watch everything else open up. That’s a phenomenal piece of advice that helped me. I try to take my own medicine on a regular basis.
Excellent. No, I think that’s really great. One of the most powerful questions that was ever asked to me by Dan Sullivan was, “What are your top three dangers, your top three opportunities, and your strengths you have to achieve those opportunities?” Absolutely. When you really simplify it and cut through the noise, you’re 100% right. If you have a big danger in your life, focus on removing it. Don’t let it impede your progress. Move that away, focus on your opportunities, and use your strengths for those opportunities. It’s quite powerful.
Yeah, it’s a quick mental model for folks. If you want to put this into an effective applied level, it’s the start-stop-continue mental model. What do you need to start, what do you need to stop, and what do you need to continue? I would venture to say you should start with what you should stop doing. So many times, people want to add certain things—read another book, go to another mastermind, do something else. That’s probably not the best advice. The best advice is to ask, what do you need to stop doing? Maybe I need to stop watching three hours of Netflix every single night. Maybe I need to stop sleeping 10 hours a day and try to sleep eight hours a day, work out one hour a day, and read one hour a day. I think the stop mentality is extremely important. The start-stop-continue model really helped me put that into application.
Awesome. Logan, really appreciate you coming on the show today. I know you’ve provided a ton of value for listeners. Where can folks reach out to you, connect, and follow you?
Absolutely. I’m highly focused on LinkedIn. If anyone is on LinkedIn, you can find me, Logan Freeman, Mr. Kansas City. I post daily there, sharing what I’m reading, learning, and working on in a really nice way. I’ve gained a lot of followers on that platform and love it. Our website is ftwinvestmentsllc.com. A lot of the things Dave and I talked about today, I write a weekly blog that goes out to our list, which has a lot of followers looking for investing advice as well. Those are the two places people can reach out to me.
Awesome. Thanks for coming on, Logan. Really enjoyed the discussion and look forward to continuing to collaborate.
Thank you. The pleasure was all mine today. I really appreciate you having me on.
Awesome.